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I was thinking that one way to easily allow a map to have different diffculties in a map was to have differing hypertrigger speeds.
Normally, of course, hypertriggers run 12 times a second, and your wait time is 0. (actually its more like 84ms)
But if you wanted to make the map easier, all that's required may be just to make the triggers run less often, so that the hypers run only 6 times, or 4 times a second, or even less.
So you could allow the player to set a difficulty setting at the beginning, without having to have a large number of extra triggers relating to each difficulty.

Perhaps this could be used in a bound map or a defence map, or to give a player faster or slower income? Or even a single player campaign/scenario with timed events.
Can you think of other ways to use this concept?

Is it practical? Can you think of other easy ways to have different difficulty settings within a map?

Very simple. Alter the wait times on hypertriggers. Note that no trigger firing speed will be noticeable between 0 and 84 mS waits. Higher wait times will make the HTs take longer to excecute. Could be used to alter the speed of timed events, yes. However, it wouldn't affect the explosion rate in bounds, only the delay between the end and next start of the whole obstacle trigger. Though it would slow down sucky traps and such. Interesting idea...

I think you can't change the difficulty in a melee UMS map or something.
The computer does not have specific triggers to order it what to do. Just an AI.
Even if it did, it would only slow it down by like 1 second or so.

other maps, such as bounds, it would affect it a lot...

or even better, modify the waits for each obstacle using death counts in the conditions.

I don't know who moved this because of the report but this thread IS a concept. The questions are not asking for help, they are asking for opions.

>Moved Back to Concepts

Are you sure about the 84 ms thing? I'm almost positive that I've had an effect by making hyper triggers 5 or 10 ms instead of 0.

This method would probably work for bounds and defense maps.

One method to change difficulty level for RPGs or maps like that is to make enemy spawn triggers belong to the all the human players in the game. That way you get the same number of enemies per player in the game.

No, I'm not positive, but since the HT wait action takes 84mS to excecute I don't see a wait 5 changing things.

Also, I seem to remeber either Bolt or Dabbu stating that any wait between 0 and 84 acts the same.

- Dabbu, in "Hypertriggers (conceptual)" (http://www.staredit.net/index.php?tutorial=128)


- (U)Bolt_Head, in "Hypertriggers" (http://www.staredit.net/index.php?tutorial=49)

Note that hypertriggers run 12 times in 1000 milliseconds (that's 1 second). If you do the maths, it turns out that a hypertrigger run (with wait time 0) should be about 84ms. And it is.
Someone (I can't remember who) also did some measurements and found one game second to equal 1008 real milliseconds (on normal speed). Note that 12*84 = 1008.

Neither one of those comments definitively said that changing the length of the wait in the hypertrigger has no effect if it's less than 84 ms. They just said that when you have hypertriggers with a wait of 0, triggers fire about every 84 ms.

Hehe...a little logic lesson:

If (HT wait = 0) then (triggers fire every 84 ms)

You cannot conclude anything about when HT wait is not 0.

I'll do some testing real quick..

OK, here's the setup:
At the beginning of the map, I set the countdown timer for 10 seconds. I had HTs going, and as long as the timer was at least 1 second I added one mineral to my resources.

For wait times of 0, 10, and 40 ms I received a total of 79 minerals.
For wait times of 70 and 83 milliseconds I received a total of 53 minerals.

So there is an interval at which wait times do not make a difference, but this would seem to indicate that it's less than 70 ms.

I've never done any testing to prove that the smallest increment is 84 milliseconds but i do know hyper triggers fire once every 84milliseconds. (according to my 6 hour test). I'm know that there is a minium wait interval. We will have to find Dabbu's research stuff.

Bah.

*gets out stopwatch and SF* I'll just test it.

One thing I should point out is that I was doing these tests on single player, with "normal" game speed. As we all know (or should know), the countdown timer speed is affected by the game speed. I'm pretty sure that when it comes to wait times, milliseconds are milliseconds so if you ran the same test on a different game speed you would get a different number of minerals.

But still, it shows that it does make a difference!
HM...
That was a real accurate way of measuring it.

Heimdal waits don't vary in leanth with the game speed.

Edit, ohh you said that cause the countdown does. Silly Me.

heh,
On the bound map im currently working on, titled "Fiendish Bound" I have only 2 difficulties and I just double my triggers with SF, Copy and Paste and change the Wait time periods between the explosions. Think that takes allong time? Actually what I do is this, copy and paste the trigger codeing into notepad. Then after that hit CTRL + H into notepad to replace a string with something of your choice. So lets say on Easy difficulty the waiting period is 200 ms. So it would look something like this:


Then useing the Replace function in notepad, replace the string Wait(200); with perhaps Wait(190); and then copy the new codeing in your notepad into the codeing into starforge. How long did that take? 8 seconds at the most! Takes me like 5 seconds after doing it over and over. Now how long would it take someone to do it all by hand in Sc Xtra editor for each of there obsticles, take allot longer huh! Thats why I never use Xtra editor for triggers anymore, I just use SF for all my mapping. Difficulty makeing with extra triggers don't take up that much extra space btw.

I understand that there are many quick ways of making similar triggers, but the original idea was to reduce the number of triggers needed. I'm not sure what the significance of triggers are in terms of map size, but it's still nicer to be able to do anything with the least number of triggers.

Seek efficiency.

The size that an individual trigger adds to the map varies with the "density" of information in the trigger (because of the compacting algorithm), but on average it's around 64 bytes which isn't a whole lot. But I wholeheartedly agree that doing something with fewer triggers makes your map much more elegant and (more importantly) maintainable.

Generally, however you're setting the difficulty would depend on the map type.

Defense, more enemies, give enemies bonus, give players less to fight with.

Hero Actions maps, give players less per kill, stronger enemies, weaker heroes

Bound, less lives, slower units

Well, you should get what I'm trying to say by now.